(SWITZERLAND)

A new initiative was launched today at the World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting designed to address the digital skills gap globally.

The WEF’s Closing the Skills Gap 2020 platform will recruit international businesses to lead the drive to reskill and upskill employees over the next couple of years. It will tap into the organisation’s recent report, Towards a Reskilling Revolution: A Future of Jobs for All, which suggests ways this can be done. And the closingtheskillsgap.org website – from Tata Consultancy Services – has also been set up to support these efforts.

The 2020 campaign is part of the WEF’s Closing the Skills Gap Project, which creates pathways at national and international levels for delivering a workforce equipped to succeed in the age of acceleration. To date, the project has attracted 26 ‘global founding partners’.

“Digital technologies are transforming the world around us – including the way we work and the nature of relationships between businesses and employees. So it’s critical to provide people around the world with access to education that is relevant and contextual, to gain skills that move them from consumers to creators in this new digital economy. Only then will we harness the abundance of potential talent that’s currently untapped. I am proud of our pledge to help reskill over 1 million people by 2020 as part of Closing the Skills Gap 2020,” said Rajesh Gopinathan, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, Tata Consultancy Services, India.